Obama's Pakistan connection

LAHORE: Barack ObamaBarack Obama is no stranger to Pakistan. He travelled to Karachi in 1981 as a 20-yr-old student and stayed in Sindh for three weeks while his mother worked as a consultant to the Asian Development Bank for five years in Punjab.

Addressing a fundraiser in San Francisco in April, Obama referred to the trip, saying he knew the differences between Sunni and Shia Islam before he became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Obama travelled to Pakistan when the Afghan war was at its peak following Afghanistan’s invasion by Russian troops.

Following Obama’s speech, some US newspapers even claimed that he had actually travelled to Pakistan under his Muslim name — Barry Soetero — while using an Indonesian passport. As a matter of fact, Obama had a few Pakistani friends during his college days, and it was friendship that brought him to Pakistan. In his memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama talks of having a Pakistani roommate when he moved to New York, a man he calls Sadik (his 1982 roommate at a sixth-floor walkup on East 94th Street). Obama describes Sadik as “a short, well-built Pakistani” who smoked marijuana, snorted cocaine and liked to party.”

During his years at the Occidental College, Barack befriended Wahid Hamid, a fellow student and an immigrant from Pakistan. Wahid Hamid is now a vice president at Pepsico in NYC. His third Pakistani friend was Imad Husain, now a Boston-based banker.

According to US media reports, Obama may have visited Pakistan again in the late ‘80s and stayed there for a month with his mother who was an employee of the Ford Foundation. Dunham, who died in 1995 from ovarian cancer, used to stay at Hilton International Hotel in Lahore.